He wrapped the polenta with a towel and he bent down to put it in the can. He saw the shadows. Two. Both starting from his slippers. Two bright eyes blinked palely around him. He extinguished the little lamp, but the shadows remained there. He also extinguished the second one. The shadows, one smoking a pipe and reading and the other drinking rum from a metal mug and gesticulating, did not disappear. He sat down on the bed sighing. He takes off his shades and ducks under the covers. He closed his eyes. The shadows continued to watch over him from the head of the bed.
(Translated by Alin-Marian Mărgescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In May 2023, the group has 11,260 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
